One of the more difficult tasks I tried to lead my students through is grabbing Flash video off the web, transcoding it to a digital intermediary, and then dropping that raw .avi onto the timeline of their Edius (yeah, I know – it’s a strange, strange environment) video editing program and cutting it to sync with the v/os that they shot against the bluescreen.
Some of the students were already ahead of me when it came to pulling down .flvs from the web … I showed them how to install add-ons to their Firefox browsers that will handle this kind of thing, but the struggles they had with installation were instructive. The language barrier has not been too much of a barrier here – most of the students speak some English (some quite a lot, actually), but the menu settings and technical jargon that comes with web compression settings taxes even my vocabulary.